Time for a bonfire of labour rights regulation
By Pete North - June 13, 2021
The latter stages of the Brexit process (insofar as it’s complete) were marred by a fundamental ignorance of modern trade. Particularly in the domain of labour rights. Labour insisted that we signed up to non regression clauses while remainers exploited the panic that Brexit meant a return to children up chimneys. What they didn’t understand, and never have, is that labour rights in the EU are nothing to do with welfare standards. Primarily they are market levelling mechanisms which is why they became a pillar of modern FTAs. The greatest propaganda coup of neoliberalism was to convince the left that labour rights locked into free trade relationships was in their interests.
By shunting these issues into the trade domain rather than grassroots and union politics, they essentially became the intellectual property of the globalist machine and subject to challenge through ISDS/ECJ where improvements to workers rights, over and above the minimum standards written into FTAs can be legally viewed as exclusionary protectionism. Non-regression clauses, therefore, represent a ceiling on worker’s rights.
One of those indirect measures (though not of EU origin) is the minimum wage which we have since internalised as an unalloyed good. But is it really? Minimum wage is less about ensuring people have enough to live on, than levelling the labour market across the EU to prevent cheaper internal competition. As we know, through poor enforcement, that didn’t really work. Rising wage costs also resulted in the offshoring of manufacturing outside of the EU, while it also eviscerated informal work that would support stay-at-home mums.
Since Brexit we have spoken at length about the way in which deindustrialisation and globalisation affected men, but less is said about the fate of women who at one time would have worked in garment factories or done low rate manual work in the home with the assistance of their children. That work is now done either in Vietnam or in backstreet UK sweatshops, usually by illegal immigrants. Back in the eighties women could find supplementary income but now those jobs are gone resulting in women turning to strip clubs, “glamour modelling” and in recent years, OnlyFans for an income over and above welfare handouts. With depressingly predicable self-perpetuating outcomes.
As much as we’ve spoken about the role of predatory Pakistani grooming gangs, locking them up is demand side reform. What we’re not looking at is the supply side. The ugly truth is that many of these girls are turned loose to fend for themselves and nobody really knows or cares where they are. Too old to be stuck indoors and too young to go to work, and there’s no work for them anyway. No means of picking up a skill.
If then, we are talking about “levelling up” to create a better society where this doesn’t happen, as much as we need controls on the import of people from the armpits of the world, we should also look carefully at our trade policy that opens the door to poorly produced single-use fast fashion garments that destroy any chance of stimulating a domestic industry that supports jobs. That necessarily means we should be paying more for our clothes, but this is exactly what Sir James Goldsmith was warning about in the early nineties. Food shouldn’t be cheap and nor should clothes.
But then we could make it easier by abolishing the minimum wage. It is, after all, a mechanism to deal with the social consequences of freedom of movement. Since we no longer have it, and if we get to grips with illegal immigration enforcement, we don’t need the corrective mechanism. If the result is fewer young women living on welfare, acquiring skills and away from sex predators in the streets and online, then they are better off in every respect.
This is why Brexit is so absolutely necessary in that trade is not a sterile technical discipline abstract to politics, it is an essential tool of statecraft, integral to politics. As we have gradually surrendered to the dogma of free trade for its own sake, the rest of our politics is geared to treating the downstream symptoms of globalisation be it prostitution or gambling addiction. We’ve become addicted to regulation instead of integrated politically driven policy.
As we have discussed elsewhere on TT, immigration control is something else that does not happen in abstract of other policies. Trade, immigration and social policy are all interconnected and any policy that deals with them individually is going to fail every single time. We therefore need holistic thinking about how we use trade as a tool for reshaping our society with a view to solving the problems that are ripping at the moral fabric of the nation.
In this we shouldn’t be afraid to look at imposing tariffs and deregulating labour laws, while reintegrating unions into the conversation about pay and conditions sector by sector, tailoring the economy to suit all levels. Our neoliberal one-size-fits-all regulatory model may have made us materially richer statistically, but not for those at the bottom who we abandon, and it has undoubtedly made us spiritually poorer while we gorge ourselves of cheap goods and off-season foods. If we’re simply going to continue with the same broken model of regulation, turning a blind eye to the fallout, then Brexit was a waste of time.